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New York Times
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Pierre Huyghe's Bracing Dark Mirror of A.I. Has Its U.S. Debut
Tech boosters and doomers alike wonder when A.I. will be truly be sentient, able to think or feel. Pierre Huyghe asks a less predictable question: What is machinelike about human beings? Reflexes, impulses, routines: His show at Marian Goodman Gallery in Lower Manhattan, titled 'In Imaginal,' hints at how alien so-called artificial intelligence really is — and, on reflection, how mysterious we are to ourselves. In Huyghe's 2024 video 'Camata,' installed at Goodman, the camera pans across cracking bones in a picturesque desert. This skeleton is the scene's most human presence. Soon, a robotic arm enters the frame, gripping a turquoise stone; an autonomous camera whirs and focuses; a motorized reflector adjusts the light. 'Camata' was filmed by a hybrid crew of A.I.-guided and human-operated robots, staked out around the remains of an unknown young man — likely a soldier from a 19th-century war — found in Chile's Atacama Desert. In what is meant to be a funerary ritual, the robotic cameras spend as much time filming one another as they do examining the man's rotting shoes or curled hand. 'Camata' is a forlorn and affective artwork, and a brutally crisp picture of human-A.I. interaction. An algorithm edits the film in real time. The software's motivation is arcane. The work is constantly changing, with no beginning or end. Huyghe (pronounced weeg), a lauded French artist, is known for his striking environments blurring boundaries of art, nature and technology. Since the 1990s he has made a name for himself by 'collaborating' with nonhumans. He's given a crab a gold mask for a shell, dyed the leg of a dog named Human pink, and attached a living beehive to the head of a nude statue. His current show at Goodman marks the U.S. debut of works, including 'Camata,' which premiered last year during the Venice Biennale, offsite at the Punta della Dogana, a contemporary art museum within a maritime customs complex. It demonstrates the ways Huyghe has incorporated A.I. models into his explorations of inhumanness. The gallery at Goodman is dark and cavernous. Just seven pieces — comprising two videos, four sculptures and three masks — are spread across two floors. In an upstairs room, dimly lit in red, the only work is the startling sight of a person crouching in the corner with a glowing plastic shell covering their face. At seemingly random intervals, the mask — part of a work titled 'Idiom' — blurts out nonsense speech generated by machine learning, a series of trills, yeows and slurps. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Los Angeles Times
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Bruce Nauman's pensive Conceptual art from the 1970s seems timely again
Out in the back garden of Marian Goodman Gallery in Hollywood, a solid steel square, four feet wide and four inches thick, sits on the gravel covered ground. 'Dark' is a legendary 1968 sculpture, one that caused great consternation when first shown at an annual purchase competition at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, south of San Diego, where it won the $1,900 first prize. Adjusted for inflation, that's more than $17,000 today — not an insignificant chunk of change for a '60s art contest. Some were outraged. A blank steel plate, apparently just waiting to rust? Local sculptor Frank James Morgan, whose conventional portrait busts and stylized bronzes of women had gained some notice, wasn't having it, and he denounced Nauman's sculpture as 'junk' in a letter to the San Diego Union. Artist John Baldessari, a competition organizer just then getting traction for his own Dada-inspired anti-art, leapt to its defense in a three-page, 18 bullet-point text. At Goodman, the sculpture sets up 'Bruce Nauman: Pasadena Years,' a modestly scaled but museum-quality survey of his work from 1969 to 1979, the prolific decade when the now critically lauded artist lived in Los Angeles. (A resident of New Mexico since then, Nauman is 83.) Two dozen works are on view, including sculptures, installations, videotapes, drawings and prints, plus the artist's book 'LAAir,' featuring 10 full-page color photographs said to show the city's famous smog. The book's title makes a droll pun for 'lair,' a villainous place of danger or death, while his vivid, mostly monochrome abstract photographs of poisoned atmosphere wittily recall fashionable Color Field paintings. 'Dark' immediately predated his move from Northern California. The dust-up that ensued among artists and critics was another signal that the region was continuing to mature as a center for the production and presentation of provocative new art. 'Dark' doesn't look like much. The solid but shallow steel box, weighing in at a reported 1.3 tons, was an example of a recently emerging, stripped-down Minimalist aesthetic. The artist's last name is written in block letters along one edge, but there's some confusion over whether the artist or the school added it later as an identifier. There was also the matter of the sculpture's title, 'Dark,' which referred to the artist's claim that the word had been scrawled on the underside of the brute slab. Was the word 'dark' just meant to describe what was under there — darkness, the absence of light beneath a space-gobbling hunk of immovable material? Was it inscribed as a mordant Dada riposte to the shimmering ephemerality of Light and Space art, the perceptual spatial enigmas by Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler and others who were fashioning the first wholly original art form to emerge from sunny Southern California? Maybe. But encountering 'Dark' now, something else stands out: There is no way for a viewer to know for certain whether the word is really written on the underside, beneath all that obdurate tonnage. None. It's unknowable. A viewer, and not just the gravel beneath the steel plate, is in the dark. Aside from the general 'don't touch' social prohibition hovering in the presence of any art object, lifting this particular weighty slab is impossible. You'll simply have to take the artist's word for it that the declaration is written there. The confrontation with Nauman's sculpture is a blunt exercise in artistic faith — an expression of trust between artist and audience, and an agreement to play together. If you can't grant that, you probably should just walk away from art — this or any other. That contemporary art might be a dubious realm populated by frauds and charlatans seems quaint today, but once upon a time it was a standard assumption. It was there from the beginning. In 1916, at the first large-scale U.S. exhibition of Modern American art held in New York City, the acerbic critic at The Nation magazine gave the stink-eye to claims of the avant-garde's artistic seriousness. 'Many persons are most seriously convinced that the world is flat,' wrote Frank Jewett Mather, looking down his nose, 'the poor whites of certain Southern regions are most seriously convinced that clay is a delicious comestible. But their seriousness doesn't matter, and I think that the seriousness of these Modernists matters very little.' Nauman, at a tumultuous and perplexing period of upheaval politically, socially and artistically, was getting down to basics. For 1968, which has been called 'the year that shattered America,' such a compact of faith at the core of 'Dark' — and a contract between strangers, no less — is no cavalier thing. Neither is it today. Civil rights, gender equality, Vietnam, student protest — so many divisive crises then are being repeated now, in our time of advancing darkness, with Ukraine and Gaza replacing Southeast Asia. Nauman's sculpture is thoroughly non-figurative, but its inescapable social and political dimensions resonate anew. So do those of 'Performance Corridor,' a baffling installation made when Nauman moved into a Raymond Ave. studio the following year. He was 27, with a wife and son, and they shared a rambling Craftsman house nearby, owned by curator and art dealer Walter Hopps, with artist Richard Jackson. Hopps was a wealth of information about Dada godfather Marcel Duchamp, whose now legendary 1963 retrospective he had organized for the Pasadena Art Museum. Nauman paid close attention to Duchamp's penchant for an art of puns and conundrums. As a sculpture, 'Performance Corridor' might be even more initially mute than 'Dark,' but it ends up speaking volumes. The corridor, eight feet tall and 20 feet long, is built from ordinary wall board and exposed two-by-four struts. One end is flush against a gallery wall, and looking into the unembellished corridor from the open end isn't promising. Roughly shoulder-width, it invites one person at a time to walk down the hall looking straight ahead. Arriving at the blank gallery wall at the end of a restricted, uneventful walk, one's immediately puzzled thought is, 'Why am I here?' And, after all, that is the question, isn't it? The performance in 'Performance Corridor' isn't something Nauman is doing, beyond performing a set-up for any art viewer to be nudged into wondering: Why am I here? Existential inquiry is an artistic staple, but typically it tends toward big gestures and grand declarations — see extravagant and flamboyant Abstract Expressionist paintings of the late-1940s and 1950s for examples. Nauman's, however, is refreshingly without illusions or pretensions. Also in 1969, although not part of the fine Goodman gallery exhibition, he sketched out a paradoxical skywriting sculpture that wasn't executed until 40 years later, when finally, it was performed in 2019 from a small airplane flying over Pasadena's Rose Bowl. 'Leave the land alone,' the ephemeral skywriting said in puffs of wispy smoke. The aerial sentiment about environmental degradation below also artfully invokes individual human mortality, when just a slight pause precedes the final word. Leave the land — alone. Nauman's skywriting drifted for a moment in the late-summer breeze, then disappeared. Marian Goodman Gallery, 1120 Seward St., Hollywood, (310) 312-8294, through April 26. Closed Sunday and Monday.
New York Times
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Images of Ukraine, When Things Began to Fall Apart
When future historians seek to understand life in the twilight years and aftermath of the Soviet Union, from the late 1960s to the close of the 20th century, they will study the photographs of Boris Mikhailov. An artist who had to work surreptitiously in his youth, Mikhailov since the collapse of the Soviet regime has enjoyed worldwide acclaim, including exhibitions of his pictures at the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern. Like Nikolai Gogol, another Russian-speaking Ukrainian, Mikhailov depicts hardship and pretense with a guffaw. 'Isn't it awful?' elides seamlessly into 'Isn't it funny?' — all of it tinged with a melancholy awareness that the joke may be on him. Mikhailov has homes in his native Kharkiv and in Berlin, although he has not been to Ukraine since the Russian invasion. Vigorous at 86, he included a new video composed of still photographs along with a sampling from some of his best-known photo series, in 'Boris Mikhailov: Refracted Times,' at Marian Goodman Gallery through Feb. 22. He likes to explore a subject thoroughly by presenting a sequence of images, frequently juxtaposed in pairs to highlight recurring themes and revealing incongruities. Mikhailov could not exhibit his work publicly until 1990, when the Soviet Union was on the brink of dissolution. He initially built a reputation in Kharkiv by superimposing photographic slides and projecting them in private apartments. Once he was no longer confined by state censors, he printed the images as montages that he called 'Yesterday's Sandwich.' In the exhibition at Marian Goodman, a video reproduces the original projections, with one image quickly succeeded by the next, to the accompaniment of a Pink Floyd soundtrack. Very often, he placed a shot of a nude woman (forbidden under Soviet morality standards) on top of a drab street scene or an idealized landscape, infusing the dreary reality or banal fantasy of Soviet life with a suppressed eroticism. The bathers in 'Salt Lake,' a series he made in 1986, are scantily dressed, but they tend to be elderly and bulky, occasionally in the company of a throng of children. They have flocked to this polluted lake in eastern Ukraine because the warm salty discharge from the soda factories on its shores was thought to be salubrious. Picnicking by railroad tracks or swimming alongside effluent pipes, they are either stalwart or delusional. Displayed on a table near the large prints is a unique leporello, or accordion-pleated maquette, that Mikhailov made for the series by assembling black-and-white photos in foldout book form. He then toned the prints in sepia, summoning ironic associations with the grand European spas of an earlier time at Vichy and Baden-Baden. In some, the compositions are dominated by large figures and recall the photographs of families by the Seine made by a French artist Mikhailov cites as an influence, Henri Cartier-Bresson. But what was lyrical in France has become farcical in the Soviet Union. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, the economy foundered, social supports vanished, and things went from bad to horrific. The exhibition doesn't include 'Case History,' a controversial series that Mikhailov, assisted by his wife, Vita, made in 1997 and 1998 by paying indigent people in Kharkiv to pose for his camera, sometimes having them strip in the freezing weather and display their sagging flesh, injuries and deformities. Less confrontational and more elegiac, 'By the Ground' (1991), sepia-colored like 'Salt Lake,' comprises paired photographs that Mikhailov shot with a panoramic camera he held at hip level. As he took these pictures of homeless people struggling with bundles and pushing their remaining possessions in wheelbarrows, Mikhailov was thinking of the American photographers who had portrayed migrants and the unemployed in the Great Depression. He installs these prints low, so that viewers must cast their eyes downward to pay attention to the people sloughed off as dregs by the churn of history. In one pair of photographs, a boy turned toward a friend is oblivious of the old woman sleeping beside him on their shared bench. In the companion photo, a pedestrian walks past a filthy man sleeping in a contorted pose on a narrow stone curb, while in front of him, truck-born carts carry rags that, like the sprawled vagrant, are discards. Beautifully composed and lit, the 'By the Ground' photographs constitute a somber memorial to those left behind by social revolution. Instead of sepia, Mikhailov used blue to color the prints in 'At Dusk,' which he made in 1993, also with a panoramic camera. Although the images resemble cyanotypes, for Mikhailov the color conjures the bombing he experienced as a child in Kharkiv at twilight during World War II. The pictures are grainy, and the prints are distressed with smears and scratches. They look as battered and weary as their subjects, who are trudging, stumbling and scavenging. In some, there are no telltale details to indicate that these are images made recently and not during Mikhailov's childhood. The suffering and endurance are timeless. In an eight-minute silent video, 'Our Time Is Our Burden' (2024), the recent piece in the exhibition, Mikhailov displays paired photos that he shot in Berlin, where the waste is the sort generated by overabundance. (The video also includes an appropriated photo, of a crow a dove released in St Peter's Square in Rome in 2014, as Pope Francis called for peace in Ukraine after anti-government protesters had been killed in Kyiv.) In one juxtaposition, old shoes and plates are displayed on blankets at a flea market, and the facing image depicts a pile of empty bottles on the street, near people congregating at a gay bar. Now that Mikhailov is out of Kharkiv, he can no longer chronicle its inhabitants, who have suffered tremendously from Russian aggression. Without his longtime subject, the art is deracinated. Even when he takes up his old themes in Berlin — there is a homeless man paired with a fellow in a clown suit in 'Our Time Is Our Burden' — the impact is far less powerful. Because of his fondness for montage, he is sometimes compared to Aleksandr Rodchenko, the great Russian Constructivist. But Mikhailov's images, although beautiful, are less about formalist ingenuity. Instead, they vividly evoke a panoply of desperate struggles and dearly won joys, at a particular time in a specific place.
